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| Smell the rubble and dust |
You can almost hear the bombs and smell
the burning buildings as you read this book on the Blitz, writes
Piers Plowright
Blitz by MJ Gaskin
Faber & Faber, £16.99
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The City burns in 1940
Residents shelter from the bombs in Holborn Tube station
Books are rescued from inner London rubble
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EVERYONE knows the picture. Standing on the roof of the Daily
Mail building, Fleet Street, in the early hours of December 30,
1940, press photographer Herbert Mason got one of the great photos
of all time: St Paul’s Cathedral rising like a ship of light
above the black clouds and smoke of war.
London had just endured its worst night of bombing by the Luftwaffe
and the click of a camera shutter had caught both the horror and
the hope. Hitler, having given Britain a break over Christmas, sent
the bombers in at 6pm on December 29 and rained down incendiary
and high explosive bombs. By the morning, city churches, warehouses,
schools, hospitals and whole districts had been destroyed and hundreds
were dead or missing.
This is the subject of Margaret Gaskin’s vivid and richly detailed
book.
If you’re looking for the grand sweep of strategy or the shifts
of high politics – although Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and
Hitler make fleeting appearances – this is not the book for
you. But if you want the feel and sound and taste and smell of what
it was to go through the night in wartime London then you should
read it.
Gaskin has drawn on diaries, letters, reports, radio broadcasts,
conversations and memories, to reveal the complex web of bravery,
absurdity, prejudice and generosity, that stretched across the city
and the suburbs in the days leading up to, and during, what they
called ‘The Second Great Fire of London’. Using earlier
chapters as a countdown to the attack and then moving to a description
of it, she fans out to give a context, set the scene and introduce
us to the ordinary Londoners who become the main actors in the drama.
People like bank clerk, BJ Rogers, knocked over by a bomb blast
in Lombard Street and covered with ash, reporting calmly at the
Bank of England for his night shift, out-of-work actress Barbara
Nixon picking up the shattered remains of a baby blown through a
window in Finsbury, the entire audience of the Leicester Square
Odeon, wallowing in the glorious Technicolour of The Thief of Bagdad
(sic) who decided to stay until the end of the picture. ‘London’
in a phrase that has become clichéd ‘could take it’.
But Gaskin digs a little deeper.
To reveal, among other things, the cracks that ran under the surface
camaraderie: anti-semitism – “Stand back for the Chosen
Race, dear,” says a man with heavy irony as a Jew accidentally
steps in front of his wife in Aldgate; racism – Nigerian born
Fire-Warden EI Ekpenyon meeting hostility and bloody-mindedness
until his blackness turns him into a good-luck charm; class-war
– a group of East Enders invading the Savoy Hotel where there
was no shortage of food and shelter to harangue the wealthy diners;
and the crime and occasional looting that went on under cover of
darkness and confusion.
Though a splendidly brisk female civil servant had her way of dealing
with another nocturnal danger: shining her dimmed torch-beam onto
her face she snapped: “Over 40 and very busy,” and strode
on as the man fled.
The book’s structure, in spite of the mounting excitement,
is a bit confusing. Do we really need the musical divisions into
Prelude, Fugue, Chorale, and Coda?
And the writing sometimes descends into folksiness, but it’s
the detail that counts, the sharp observations that lift this book
above the ordinary.
The sound of firebombs rushing through the darkness like autumn
leaves, the shriek of the organ in St Lawrence Jewry as, hot air
blowing through its burning pipes, it crashes to the floor, and
the forthright voice of a woman confronting the mayor of Clerkenwell
in Bunhill Fields shelter over sleeping arrangements: “I don’t
care if you’re the effing ‘orse, I want my bleedin’
bunk!”
A Camden connection: one of Margaret Gaskin’s ‘eye-witnesses’,
Isabelle Granger, whose splendid letters to a friend in America
throughout the Blitz and on this ‘brutal night’ greatly
enliven the story, ended her days in Gayton Crescent, where she
used to entertain her friends with the same wit and wisdom. Let
her have the last word: “[Last night] was horrible and tragic
but if it’s the way to show what Hitler and the Appeasers stood
for, then let the bombs drop and shriek out louder than we’ve
been able to: it’s a language everyone understands and if it
will restore a sense of values to everyone, every bomb is worth
while.”
• Piers Plowright is an award-winning BBC drama and documentary
producer who lives in Hampstead. |
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